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Hundreds of Beavers
(2022)
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Mark Asch
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A midnight movie for an era of YouTube playthroughs and Twitch livestreams.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
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The Outwaters
(2022)
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Kim Newman
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If the job of a horror film is to terrify, then The Outwaters is refreshingly direct and astonishingly successful even as it is, in certain ways, wilfully obscure.
Posted Jul 08, 2024
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MaXXXine
(2024)
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Anton Bitel
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a witty, gory, coke-fuelled exposé of the Hollywood machine at its most cynically exploitative, where implicit in the rise of every star is an eventual fall.
Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Kill
(2023)
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Kim Newman
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Kill delivers non-stop spectacular carnage in an undeniably crowd-pleasing manner with Lakshya presenting as an iconic superstar (bare-chested but wounded) as he breaks, batters and stabs all comers.
Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Jaws
(1975)
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James Monaco
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There isn't an ounce of dead wood in it; it is the sum total of thousands of 'effects' (special and otherwise) tested and tuned to produce the desired response in the audience. Jaws is a landmark of modem cinematic engineering.
Posted Jul 02, 2024
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20,000 Species of Bees
(2023)
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Mark Kermode
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Warmly humanist and deeply empathetic first feature… announcing the arrival of a bold new filmmaking voice.
Posted Jun 21, 2024
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The Exorcism
(2024)
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Anton Bitel
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In blurring the line between horror films and filmmaking, ...writer-director Joshua John Miller is once more, as in his previous The Final Girls (2015), offering a sophisticated, metacinematic take on genre
Posted Jun 20, 2024
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The Trouble with Jessica
(2023)
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Miriam Balanescu
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It’s disarmingly strange and freewheeling in tone, undercut by a ruthlessly dark humour.
Posted May 08, 2024
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Baltimore (AKA Rose's War)
(2023)
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Katie McCabe
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Baltimore is not really a biopic. You could call it a ‘character-driven heist movie’, a moody triptych that leaps freely between timelines.
Posted May 07, 2024
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Persona
(1966)
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Susan Sontag
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A succession of ever more difficult and rewarding films has turned up in recent years. But that good fortune releases nobody who cares about films from acclaiming work as original and triumphant as Persona.
Posted May 03, 2024
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Planet of the Apes
(1968)
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David Wilson
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Much of the credit for making this final message almost totally persuasive must go to the make-up department: underneath those flexible simian masks real characters evolve.
Posted May 01, 2024
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Back to Black
(2024)
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Rebecca Harrison
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Like Winehouse herself, the film teeters on the edge, hovering restlessly between genre-subversive brilliance that complicates celebratory narratives about artistic genius, and well-worn, re-hashed tropes about tragic women.
Posted Apr 21, 2024
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Cat Person
(2023)
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Rebecca Harrison
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A messy adaptation that never commits to its central argument and does a disservice to the younger audience that it’s striving to reach. The filmmakers may have done all the background reading, but nevertheless spectacularly missed the point.
Posted Apr 21, 2024
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Celluloid Underground
(2023)
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Rebecca Harrison
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Khoshbakht’s personal insights are what make Celluloid Underground really sing, reassuring us that the idea of cinema and its power to make us feel will remain, even after we are gone.
Posted Apr 21, 2024
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Shabu
(2021)
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Rebecca Harrison
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Culminating in a carnival-esque party for the local residents, Shabu tells a story about what it means to say sorry and do the right thing by the people that matter – and that’s something many of us could learn from, no matter our age.
Posted Apr 21, 2024
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The Caine Mutiny
(1954)
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Lewis Ballan
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Just enough of the central situation is preserved to keep the film dramatically on its feet
Posted Apr 19, 2024
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The Lavender Hill Mob
(1951)
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Gavin Lambert
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The ingenious starting point of T.E.B. Clarke's script of The Lavender Hill Mob provides some episodes of original and diverting comedy, and allows Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway to develop two characterizations in lively contrast.
Posted Apr 18, 2024
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The Big Heat
(1953)
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Lindsay Anderson
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Above all, it is directed with a dramatic incisiveness, a sharp-edged observation that keeps the pitch of interest and excitement continuously high.
Posted Apr 11, 2024
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Dog Day Afternoon
(1975)
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James Monaco
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Pierson and Lumet have come up with a movie of surprising wit, humor, and understanding.
Posted Apr 07, 2024
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977)
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John Pym
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One feels throughout a little like an unwilling guest at an evangelical meeting: being thumped about the ears with bits and pieces of received "truth" to which the only response is acceptance or baffled disbelief.
Posted Apr 03, 2024
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The Sweet East
(2023)
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Catherine Wheatley
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The Sweet East reveals itself as an undeniably exhilarating ride, surreal and satirical, and not quite of this world.
Posted Apr 02, 2024
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Total Trust
(2023)
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Nick Bradshaw
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A compelling warning of unchecked surveillance, holding an incriminating mirror to our would-be watchers.
Posted Apr 02, 2024
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Sabrina
(1954)
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Karel Reisz
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A simple Cinderella story set in ritzy Long Island society, it has pleasant, at times agreeably witty, dialogue and proves to be an enjoyable matinée entertainment.
Posted Mar 28, 2024
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The Searchers
(1956)
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Lindsay Anderson
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[John Wayne's] performance lacks either complexity or consistency. Instead of complexity, we get occasional nastiness alternating with guarded but essentially genial humour. The moods of the film are equally uneven.
Posted Mar 25, 2024
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Immaculate
(2024)
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Anton Bitel
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For all its looking back to cinema past, Immaculate explores a topic that could not be more incendiary in present-day America, , in the wake of the 2022 overturning of Roe vs Wade by a newly conservative-majority Supreme Court.
Posted Mar 22, 2024
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Exhuma
(2024)
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Anton Bitel
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It makes up for its paucity of scares through the multiple layers of weirdness that it excavates, as one (burial) plot leads to another and as legacy, whether genetic or national, has unseen depths.
Posted Mar 19, 2024
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The Dead Don't Hurt
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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a ruminative state-of-the-nation oater, its tender romance forced to ride along with capitalist rapacity and death.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Lisa Frankenstein
(2024)
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Anton Bitel
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Like Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009), also scripted by Diablo Cody, Lisa Frankenstein disinters a murderous monstrousness from female adolescence, empowerment and eros, while gradually reaffirming the (step)sisterhood.
Posted Mar 05, 2024
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The Shawshank Redemption
(1994)
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Lizzie Francke
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The towering Tim Robbins has a solidity and gentle interiority that occasionally reminds one here of Burt Lancaster. Of equal excellence is Morgan Freeman as Red, who holds the film together with his poetic, often quipping narration.
Posted Mar 04, 2024
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Four Weddings and a Funeral
(1994)
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Caren Myers
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Four Weddings and a Funeral, which is structured like a film student's senior project, strives to be more than that and ends up as something worse: a smarmy little fable about the magic of true love.
Posted Feb 29, 2024
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Pulp Fiction
(1994)
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Amanda Lipman
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There are plenty of brilliantly funny moments, and it is to Tarantino’s credit that he has managed to work modern, junk, and retro culture into his script with such ease.
Posted Feb 29, 2024
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Quiz Show
(1994)
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Philip Kemp
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Redford's direction is fluent and self-effacing, and he draws fine performances from his cast, not least a neat cameo from Martin Scorsese as the show's sponsor, purring with delight at his own impish cynicism.
Posted Feb 13, 2024
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I Saw the TV Glow
(2024)
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Nicolas Rapold
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As powerful as individual sequences can be and granting the urge not to give the film a smooth surface, the movie still feels balky in its assembly and direction. There’s the awed sense of a blueprint that is insisted upon without entirely being executed.
Posted Feb 02, 2024
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Baghead
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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while the slippery shapeshifter is certainly demonised (mostly by male characters), she is also a feminist heroine of sorts, collaborating with Iris to emancipate herself from oppressive effacement imposed by a patriarchal ‘brotherhood’."
Posted Jan 29, 2024
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Krazy House
(2024)
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Anton Bitel
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the film is no less deconstructive than its chauvinistic, deliberately unfunny comedy is unreconstructed, and soon the very walls and foundations of the Christian household are being literally torn apart
Posted Jan 25, 2024
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Heat
(1995)
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John Wrathall
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There's not a boring building in the film. Mann is the best director of architecture since Antonioni. In fact, few film-makers at work today can rival Mann's control of every detail of the film-making process.
Posted Dec 21, 2023
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The Last of the Mohicans
(1992)
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Henry Sheehan
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Anyone familiar with Mann's popular TV series, Miami Vice, should recognize the similarities wreaked here... The transformation of The Last of the Mohicans into Adirondack Vice is thus a successful and intentional disaster.
Posted Dec 15, 2023
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LOLA
(2022)
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Josh Slater-Williams
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Martini and Appleton’s screen presences are sufficiently intense to make up for this brisk film’s focus on narrative conceit at the expense of emotional throughline.
Posted Dec 11, 2023
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The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
(2022)
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Chloe Roddick
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In spite of its missteps, The Cow Who Sang is an assured first feature that gently weaves an intimate, personal story about motherhood, family, trauma and loss into a wider fable about environmental ruin...
Posted Dec 09, 2023
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Plan 75
(2022)
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Sara Merican
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Hayakawa’s quietly realist treatment of the dystopian premise makes for haunting viewing.
Posted Dec 08, 2023
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The Night of the 12th
(2022)
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Guy Lodge
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[Night] assumes the perspective of the police without exempting them from its damning canvas; their cool investigative professionalism (and, in a sense, the film’s) registers as its own kind of complicity in a wretched, man’s-world status quo.
Posted Dec 08, 2023
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The Origin of Evil
(2022)
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Caspar Salmon
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If The Origin of Evil were only lurid camp it would pall fairly quickly, but Marnier is careful to weave a fine vein of pathos through this narrative.
Posted Dec 08, 2023
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Little Big Man
(1970)
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Philip French
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[Director Arthur Penn and his screenwriter Calder Willingham have] tried -- on the whole pretty successfully -- to reproduce Berger's balance between authentic observation, social criticism, bizarre fantasy and mordant humor.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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State Fair
(1933)
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C.A. Lejeune
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The story has all the virtues of a national viewpoint, and the detail work of the fair scenes is honest and sincere. Henry King's direction is a marvel of intelligent compensation, and the smaller parts are well played.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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Dream Scenario
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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As Paul is raised up and ruined by his own entirely unearned viral success, Borgli offers a surreal, ultimately sad satire of 21st-century online exposure.
Posted Nov 09, 2023
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Joram
(2023)
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Lou Thomas
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This film’s uncommon blend of sizzling action, lawless atmosphere and lively locations are presented with undeniable vigour and detail.
Posted Nov 03, 2023
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The Last Picture Show
(1971)
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Jan Dawson
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Bogdanovich, keeping his audience in a suspended state of compassionate amusement, illuminates boredom from within and without and makes it entertaining.
Posted Oct 26, 2023
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Starve Acre
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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this 1970s-set folk horror, unnervingly scored by Matthew Herbert, unearths something primeval and toxic at the very roots of a once, and perhaps again, happy family.
Posted Oct 23, 2023
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Hiroshima, Mon Amour
(1959)
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Pauline Kael
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The educated audience often uses “art” films in much the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses the Hollywood “product,” finding wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and their liberalism.
Posted Oct 17, 2023
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Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
(1974)
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Tom Milne
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Juggling the moods of Robert Getchell’s script with the brilliance of Godard in his prime, Scorsese flips scenes over to reveal the other side of the coin, then balances them on edge with both sides on view.
Posted Oct 12, 2023
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